The story
High in the vault of a church in Illescas, a town on the road between Madrid and Toledo, El Greco set three canvases in praise of the Virgin, an Annunciation, a Nativity and a Coronation, painted to be seen from far below. They are still there. The Sanctuary of Our Lady of Charity is first of all a working church, the chapel of an old charity hospital, and it keeps his paintings where he made them to hang. On the main altar is his Virgin of Charity, sheltering kneeling figures under her cloak.
The hospital was founded around 1500 by Cardinal Cisneros, the powerful archbishop of Toledo, and in 1603 it hired El Greco, then living in Toledo, to decorate the chapel. He took two years instead of one, and the result led to a quarrel. The appraisers objected that among the people under the Virgin's cloak he had painted recognisable men in the stiff ruff collars of his own day. A lawsuit over the price dragged on through 1607 and 1608 and strained the painter's finances in his last years.
Also in the church is his Saint Ildefonso, the seventh-century archbishop of Toledo, seated at his writing desk before a small statue of the Virgin. It may be earlier than the main contract, since the documents never mention it. In 2020 these canvases, freshly restored, spent a few months at the Prado in Madrid before returning to Illescas.
